The Lonesome Places
by EverleighBain
Summary: He is seventeen. He has a knife with the top third broken off, a firesteel, a waterskin frozen solid, and a hunk of flesh gouged from his thigh. For the first time in his life, he is wholly and desperately lost. A survival tale told in drabbles.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Many thanks to Levade for the continual creative spurring, the beta reading, and the faithful friendship._

* * *

_"In the city men shake hands and call each other 'friend', but it is the lonesome places that tie their hearts together and hearts do not forget."_

_-C.M. Russell_

* * *

I

He will put the captain's wife and the harlot's baby on Lord Glorfindel's horse. He feels a vague unease at this, as if he is being irreparably insolent, but he knows not what else to do. She will not stop wailing, and the babe is shivering with cold.

The woodsman's girl and the other youngsters will have to walk. Walking is the only solution he has for them. The Wild sprawls before them in a great broken waste and a black storm greases the distant spine of the Hithaeglir and three children and one weeping lady look to him and only then does the fear go quiet in their eyes.

He is seventeen. He has a knife with the top third broken off, a firesteel, a waterskin frozen solid, and a hunk of flesh gouged from his thigh. For the first time in his life, he is wholly and desperately lost.

The grey horse stands in its lovely rune-etched livery while he legs Handor's lady into the saddle. Next he lifts the baby. The lady pulls her hands up and away as if he has presented her with something dead and gangrenous.

"I can't, I will not carry it! Do not ask it of me!"

He stands there with the whimpering infant lifted high in the air until he starts to feel silly. The babe begins to cry in earnest. He lowers it but holds it away from his body and wishes someone would come and take it from him.

The woodsman's girl does, finally. She comes to his side, ducking out of her cloak. It is a ratted thing with a hole at the hem. She ties it into a bulky loop and slides back into it. Relieves him of the baby and tucks it into the makeshift sling.

She has a very long neck and very sharp collarbones. Perhaps a few years younger than he. He has not yet thought to ask her name.

"Do you know where we are?" she asks in a low voice. The other two huddle a short distance away, hoarding one another's warmth.

He hesitates. Wishes for a moment he was able to lie.

"No."

She draws a breath and shifts the baby in the sling, draws it nearer to her. "Do you know where the others are?"

"I know where they were going." He glances up at the blackening eastern sky. Looks away to the south, where somewhere over long leagues lies the East Road, and beyond it, the Angle and its fertile black soil, to where the starving and uprooted Dúnedain had been fleeing when they had been set upon by brigands. Hunted for days now through the hills.

Handor's lady is still sniveling. To her he says, "If you will not carry the wean, the youngsters will ride."

She gathers up the bell-strung reins with a soft and lovely jangle. Holds them to her belly, as if she might wheel the stallion and flee if he tries to impel her down out of the saddle.

"I cannot walk," she says, and drags her broidered sleeve across her snot-slick upper lip.

His tolerance is raveling; he steps toward her.

"I will carry him," says the girl. The babe has already nestled and quieted in her tattered sling. "Put Tinu up behind her first, the boy can ride in turn."

"We will not have to travel far," says Handor's lady. "The others, surely they are just beyond the ridge."

Beyond the ridge lies another, and another beyond that, granite-hewn and glowering, limned in skimming mist. The smell of snow is on the air. The wind slides chanting through the rocks but beneath it lies the white and smothering sound of empty wilderness.

_Let's hope so_, thinks Halbarad, and pulls his own cloak close around his shoulders.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: All recognizable elements belong to J.R.R Tolkien._

_My thanks, as ever, to Levade._

* * *

II

The storm snarls into the foothills, bringing dusk far sooner than it would have come beneath a clear sky. No gentle sift of snow, but a dervish that pocks their faces like a whirl of flying sand. The grey horse bends its head into the wind and often stops and swings its hindquarters against the stinging sleet, while Handor's lady fights it for dominion, until at last Halbarad takes the reins over its head and leads it on with low entreating words.

The children stumble as they walk. The woodsman's daughter at the rear chivvies them on. He does not want to drive them through the night, knows they will not drive at all if the snow grows deep or the air colder.

Soon it is too dark to see aught but shapes. The little girl begins to cry; the boy on the horse behind the lady begins to cry with her, knowing that his seat on the warm grey rump will have to be relinquished. For a fleet and ghastly moment Halbarad thinks he might join them.

He mills his teeth together and grinds his fist hard against his leg, against the wound beneath its shabby wrap. The pain drives hot talons into his flesh and jolts him from his looming panic. He must not, must not. A precipice he will not climb back over, if he slips and takes the plummet.

A voice. He glances behind and sees the woodsman's daughter there, bent against the buffet of the storm. She wades and struggles up the line and shouts into his ear, "We must stop and make a fire, they will freeze!"

He thinks of the firesteel tucked into his boot and feels furious at the uselessness of it, with no fuel to be found. Anything that might burn is drenched or disappearing under the swift-collecting snow. The wind a thief's hand to snatch away the sparks.

He has heard stories, sitting around the Ranger fires with his father. Stories of men trapped in sudden snowstorms, alone and unprovisioned, freezing slowly in their own skin. His grandfather had told one tale of a man so maddened by the cold he slit the throat of his own horse and opened the belly and climbed inside to wait out the blizzard, warm in a cradle of dripping ribs, the sweetmeats of the horse his only portion for two days.

His eyes go to the dim, looming shape of the grey Elvish stallion.

Quick as a snap of static he knows he could not do it, not if he were freezing solid to the ground. But behind him are children clutching their own bodies and weeping with the cold, the warmth of the horse as they ride in turn their only bastion against numbing despair. The despair he knows unquestionably; it stalks them like a wolf. He has seen and done things on this day of a kind to make his own heart howl with desolation.

He halts in the drifting snow. The breath of the horse is hot on his wrist. He does not wait for the lady to slide off on her own but takes her round the waist and pulls her down. Next the boy. He leaves them standing there, the lady looking sour and bewildered but too miserable to question him.

He leads the horse a short ways away. He does not want the others to overhear his next endeavor, for fear they will take him for a lunatic. Perhaps he has become one in the short span of a day.

But he knows what his father has told him about the steeds of the Elves. He has seen for himself, seen Lord Elrohir speak to his as if it were just another man.

"I am not…" he begins. A complete and utter fool. His wits whipped away on the wind. In the dark he can just see the great gentle eye of the horse gazing out at him from beneath a heavy fall of black snow-dusted forelock. The baby has begun to wail again; he looks at them over his shoulder, the driving snow a sheer curtain between them, the children crouched together in the drifts, the lady standing a pace away with her hands up in her underarms.

"We need your warmth," says Halbarad, turning back. He speaks now in Sindarin, as his people do in benediction or lament. "I cannot make a fire. I know not if you can understand me, damn it all and the swiving storm with it, but there are children here and they will freeze to death before the morning…."

His leg and hands ache. His frozen waterskin sits tucked inside his shirt, and though it has begun to soften it is still a gnawing cold against his breastbone. Only that morning he had dragged the captain of the Rangers and a dead harlot and his best friend across the frozen ground and entombed them one upon the other in the crag of a rocky outcrop, without so much as a cairn to guard their butchered bodies. He is hungry and his feet burn with cold. Beridir's blood is black on his thighs, down the front of his jerkin. He is going to kill the pale-haired man who had led the screaming heathens down upon them.

But first he must survive the night. He must keep his promise to Handor and his promise to a dying whore.

_See them safe, I beg of you. _

"Please," he says again, and takes Lord Glorfindel's stallion by both reins, close beneath the chin. Pulls back towards the brawny chest, the soft responsive mouth giving immediately, bowing the neck in intolerable elegance. With his toe he nudges the nearer pastern, just above the hoof, and speaks a swift and shapeless prayer.

The great grey horse stoops and folds at the knees and tips its weight over into the snow, tranquil as a milkcow, steam rising from its hide and out its nostrils. Halbarad feels lightheaded with this small triumph. For a panicked moment he thinks to hobble it so it cannot rise again, but finds the notion for some reason abhorrent. He scrubs the horse's neck and goes to fetch the others.

* * *

_tbc_


	3. Chapter 3

III

They pass a cold night, but not a lethal one. The children sleep against the horse's belly inside a tent of cloaks. Halbarad and the lady and the girl huddle close around them and breathe the same air and shift in intermittent carousel to portion the warmth of the horse. The girl holds the baby close and softens bread in her own mouth to feed it until it sleeps sprawling and slack-handed on her shoulder.

Deep in the night the storm exhausts itself and the clouds sift away and leave a clear sky cold with stars. The moon a pale and leering thing. The wind dies and the wolves moan far off in the foothills. For a short while Halbarad sleeps and does not dream.

In the morning they go on with the sun creeping up at their left shoulders, the shadows of the mountains sliding east across the snow.

Twice before noon Halbarad leaves them and jogs a low rise and stands looking out on a wintry waste for some sign of their families. Twice he sees nothing but staggered foothills and granite-rimmed ridges and far to the west the hills of Arthedain rolling away into dawn-shimmered haze.

A grey sheet of cloud creeps up behind them as they walk and now stretches into the south, still high, but filling the air with particles of damp. A ring of incandescence encircles the sun. It will storm again tonight, he knows. Knows it like an uneasy aligning in his blood, like the birds and burrowing things know, and batten in themselves and their children to wait out the wailing cold.

He has no burrow. Not so much as a leeward hill to huddle against. Such a thing will not be shelter enough, not from the kind of storm that rips down the range from the northern wastes.

He quickens his step. The grey horse shuffles to keep up.

Long after midday he can no longer ignore the muffled whimpers of the boy who walks behind him, cannot ignore the way the woodsman's daughter struggles and trips through the snow trying to walk alongside aiding him, instead of single file in the trail Halbarad and the horse break through the drifts. He turned and tramps down their pitiful line and lifts the boy, slings him around one hip onto his back. He is tramping away again with his sniffling burden when he feels the tug at his cloak and stops, looks back, hot words rising on his tongue.

The woodsman's daughter does not meet his eye, but yanks again, and again. She wrenches his cloak from between his back and the child, says something under her breath, wades through the snow to stand in front of him, tugs free her mitten with her teeth, unpins the cloak, drops the pin into the snow, bends muttering to retrieve it, one hand cupping the bulge of baby, stands again, grasps the cloak, whirls it to cover the boy as well. Two now shrouded in the same warmth.

Her fingers are stiff and white with cold and fixing the brooch is a clumsy chore. For a moment he fears for his neck; she is jabbing around with the pin like a….

"'Ah-iel," she says around the muffling glove.

"What?" he says, bewildered.

She spits the glove out. Traps it between her arm and her side, and says again, "Thaliel."

He stares at her.

"My father… knows your grandfather."

The cloak is clasped again. The little boy's legs girth tight around his ribcage. The girl—Thaliel—seems suddenly shy at her own audacity

"He's Maed," she says, tipping her eyes at the child he carried. "Tinu—" over her shoulder at the girl on the horse—"And her…" She stares for a moment at the Captain's lady.

They do not know her name. She has not offered it.

"Your sister and brother?" he asks to break the silence, and hitches the child a little higher on his back.

Her rime-grey eyes lap with sudden sorrow.

"No," she says, and turns and begins again the long wade through the snow.

* * *

_tbc_


End file.
